


call and response

by sweetwatersong



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bonding, Gen, Hospitalization, Partnership, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Avengers (2012), Strike Team Delta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 18:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5386745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Stay with me," the woman he has brought in asks, and Clint has only one answer he can give.</p><p>The evolution of Strike Team Delta, in three questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	call and response

**Author's Note:**

> Day 6 of 12DoW clean out.

"Stay with me," she says quietly, this woman who has been on her own for so long, who still looks for exits and sight lines and the nearest threats she must defend herself against. And there are so many of those here: doctors, interrogators, the white hospital gown still clean against her skin for a ploy they use in the Detention level to reinforce her helpless status. (You are defenseless, you are at our mercy, you are naked within these walls.) Her hand touches his wrist, just where the armguard ends, and her cool fingers are as gentle as a child's lullaby.

They can be so much more he knows, he's read about, he's seen. They can break necks and twist fuses and pull the trigger on a four-hundred-yard kill, and they rest on his wrist bones with all the grace of a butterfly's wings.

Clint looks at her, grounded once more in a medical bed, sitting again in the hive of rules and regulations and agents intended to strangle her, and doesn't leave.

He pulls up a spare chair by her bedside, positioning himself by her injured side, and thumbs though one of the battered paperbacks until she drifts away into sleep.

 

"Don't leave me," Natasha commands, a strident note in the English that only drops into her childhood accent when she's cursing at him over the comm or dragging a wounded agent off the battlefield. Her eyes are dark and focused and Clint has no reason to question her cognitive abilities, no reason to suspect that her motivations are any than what they have always been.

He wants to laugh, the breath tugging at his lips even as he silences it, because where else is he going to go?

The spate of gunfire against the bricks by Clint’s head makes him duck, flinching away from the lethal splinters of stone. Natasha’s fingers grab his chin and turn his face up, bring his blurring gaze to meet hers.

"Don't you dare die, Barton," she tells him, and the reply he can give is not the one she wants to hear. He swallows.the words down, feeling her fingers loosen as the muscles of his jaw flex, feeling every minuscule moment of his body’s fight to survive, to stay.

Now it is a battle he can’t lose.

It won't be easy. It's been long enough that shock has let the cold into his veins, draining the heat from his body. Even as he's trying to rally a creeping lethargy is stealing from the bullet-riddled wall into his bones, thieving away his vision, his voice, his fight. The last thing he feels is the press of her cool fingers against his pulse.

When Clint wakes in an infirmary bed, coming to in a haze of blinding white walls and a crinkling hospital gown, Natasha is curled up in a chair and thumbing through a battered paperback, guarding his injured side.

 

“If you’re planning to abandon me on this team, Clint, you have another thing coming,” his partner says, the gun in her hands gleaming under the polishing rag. He hears what she does not say, hears the request that has not been a true request in years and more. They have too much between them now for words as simple as _don’t go._

In response, in answer, Clint grins. “What, you think I’d let you have all the fun? Just think about it: Hawkeye, Avenger.” He frames the title with his hands, casting the overhead lights into flaring glimpses that are reminiscent of his youth. “I mean, ‘Agent Barton’ is pretty _Men In Black_ , but that? That’s the real deal. Which reminds me, are you going to print your Avenger card with ‘Black Widow’ or ‘Femme Fatale’?” 

He catches the rag she tosses across the room at him, laughing, and wipes off the gun oil that spreads across his hands with a clean corner. She can’t be that irritated if she threw the rag instead of the gun.

“I have no idea where you get your delusions.” Natasha shakes her head as she opens her gun case, laying each of the cleaned weapons into the foam impressions they are matched to. The movements are easy, precise with the years of practice, and at the sight Clint’s hands itch for his bow, for the meditative peace brought by tending to it in a similar fashion. He turns his thoughts away instead.

“Okay, so maybe we won’t get member cards. Everyone already knows Tony, and Thor seems kinda obvious. But how else will everyone know we’re superheroes?” He tilts his head. “Maybe I should Bedazzle a costume, pick something that really stands out so people can recognize me. Black, that’s too dark. Purple, though, I could work with purple. How do you feel about masks?”

Natasha shoots him what would appear to anyone else to be a patently unamused look. Clint lets the supposed ire slide by him and raises his eyebrow in response to her hidden amusement. “Hey, do you think we get discounts for saving the world? 10% off at Starbucks, that kind of thing.”

“You don’t go to Starbucks,” she points out. Clint shrugs as far as his stiff and strained muscles will let him.

“Yeah. Only crazy people pay that much for a coffee when there’s a-dime-a-cup places still around.”

“And the fact that Sitwell comes in every morning with a grande mocha latte has no bearing on that statement.” She sets the gun case on her bedside table by a stack of well-worn books, barely wincing as her bruised ribs complain. Clint sympathizes; his own cracked ribs and battered vertebrae are still vocalizing their unhappiness, even three days into a forced bed rest.

Natasha leans back into her pillows, her wrapped ankle propped on more pillows at the end of the hospital bed, and gazes at him across the Detention infirmary room. The guns she cleaned are empty, stripped of bullets before they were allowed in as a test of his control. Even now the cameras and psychologists are watching for any sign of relapse, of mental instability. There are threats in every line of sight and the message could not be clearer: _you are defenseless, you are at our mercy, you are naked within these walls_. But Natasha has chosen to be here, guarding his injuries as he guards hers, and she gives him no room to wonder if the future she paints is a possible one.

Whatever comes, whatever doubts he has, he knows this: Natasha’s hands have broken necks, twisted fuses, pulled the triggers on four-hundred-yard kills. They have taken lives and meted justice and held his life inside of him, when all the world would have stolen it. His fate lies in them - and they will hold it with all the grace of a butterfly’s wings.

“I’m just saying, it might be worth asking about next time you want a vente expresso smoothie milk chai thing,” Clint says, mentioning nothing of his thoughts, but there is no need. "Save the world, save a few cents. Makes sense."

Natasha lets out a laughing breath. “I’d like to be there just to see you order.”

Clint is about to protest when he pauses, struck by inspiration. “What about Steve? He’s the All-American type, right? You think he’d be able to talk his way into getting us a discount?”

In the months ahead, it will turn out that Rogers is perfectly fine buying Starbucks (the product) courtesy of seventy years of interest on two bucks left in his original bank account. Genius-billionaire-philanthropist-playboy Stark can afford to buy Starbucks (the franchise) outright, and will make noises about doing so entirely to change the name to ‘Starkbucks’. The Avengers’ surprising voice of reason and unsurprising tea connoisseur, Banner, will be the one to point out what unfortunate mental images the proposed name conjures.

Clint will readily take up exploring the world of caffeine with Thor, going down to the Tower’s coffee shop and the dives around the city to try every kind of coffee known to man. Natasha will stick to her cappuccino machine, thank you, with unspoken and dire promises for any inventor foolish enough to fiddle with it.

And yet all of that will take place months and more from now, when the Avengers are not simply a collective but a team, when the idea of being a superhero isn’t far-fetched or a memo in a SHIELD file. For now, for here, Clint hears what Natasha has not said and gives the only reply that he can.

_Stay with me._

_Of course; for as long as I am able._


End file.
